


Cut Loose like an Animal

by sa00harine



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter is a Cannibal, M/M, Vampires, Were-Creatures, Will Graham is a Cannibal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28623591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sa00harine/pseuds/sa00harine
Summary: Mid-Season 2, Will resuming his therapy directly results in him and Hannibal learning something about each other they'd previously dared to tell no one. Obligatory vampire/werewolf fic:“You told me you wanted to sous-chef, my dear,” Hannibal starts, reaching for his knife as Will reaches for his. “We may begin when you are ready, it’s only polite.” His voice is tremulous now, thick with anticipation and piling amazement. A hunger present, too.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 3
Kudos: 81





	Cut Loose like an Animal

**Author's Note:**

> bite chomp kill!! they're going feral good for them <3 this was suggested 2 me and I ran w it, here you go :)

Will peers through the window at the rising inevitable full moon. Already a great cadence thrums through his veins. Soon enough it’ll be with the sound of an impending stampede. He draws in a small sigh. He knew what preparations to do- feed the dogs, make the bed, make the trek into the woods, and then he’d wake up in his bed a while later with no recollection of whatever mania took place. Often he was grateful not to know, based on the blood he’d wash from underneath his fingernails and a peculiar taste on his tongue. It usually took weeks to swallow down again. 

Similarly, he’d turn his back on the people he’d eventually be informed had gone missing. If he couldn’t find them, there was no way Jack could either. This faucet of his identity was safekept and Will had no ideations of changing that fact. 

Which is why, with eyes still tracing the swell of the starry sky, he picks up his phone and dials Hannibal’s number without looking. He doesn’t need to. Whether it had been his particularly efficient memory or the attention he didn’t want to admit to himself that he dedicated to learning all he could about Hannibal, he had his number memorized. 

Before the first ring’s even through, Hannibal picks up. Will can’t tell whether the attention flatters or frightens him. 

“Hello.” His voice is low, monotonous. Will’s conscious latches onto it, a leech trying to gather every word that it could.

Will clears his throat, plays at blase and indifferent. “Hi,” he says, launching into his exigence without preamble. “I can’t make it tonight, sorry.” 

The slight shift of the air on the other end tells him Hannibal tilted his head. He does it when something catches him off guard, or he wants you to think so. Will definitely did not find it endearing. “Is there a reason?” 

“One of the dogs is sick, I’m keeping an eye on him for the night.” He’d been prepared for Hannibal to ask. 

Hannibal hums. “Which one?” 

Will scans the seven lumps of fur mulling around the room. “Winston.” 

“Do you think he’ll be alright?” 

“He’ll be fine,” Will replies cooly. 

A pause. Will considers hanging up. Hannibal offers nothing, though the knowledge he’s sitting in the moment too, likely in his office, one leg crossed over the other as he lowered himself into his chair, is gratifying. Will knew that if he were there too he’d only have to sit all the way up for their knees to almost touch. Hannibal moved the chairs closer every time. He wasn’t slick about it. 

Hannibal swallows. “I must insist you show up, if not my office than my home,” he says, an undercurrent in his voice that Will can’t put a word to. It raises his guard immediately. He and the concept and practice of unfamiliarity were not correspondent. He was a creature of habit. As mundane as it often was, it was safe. “I’ve saved us dinner, and I’m not one to waste good food.” 

“Save it for a dinner party,” Will suggests, nudging Bandit, the newest stray he’d picked up. She tended to be clingy, currently laying at his feet. 

“I’d much rather share it with you.” Hannibal’s tone is beginning to make Will think the matter is unnegotiable. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious. Though, he didn’t know if his curiosity could drive him past his instincts. 

That question was answered swiftly when an unmistakable sob is heard across the line. Distinctly human. Perhaps tonight his curiosity and instincts would intersect. “Do we have company?” Will inquires. 

There’s a smile in Hannibal’s voice. If Will concentrates, he can see the curve of his lips upward in his mind’s eye. “We will be having company for dinner, yes.” 

It clicks then- the rising suspicion. Will blinks rapidly. A series of images are presented to him by his subconscious, an array of possibilities he’d lead himself away from to spare him the trouble of confrontation. Hannibal’s unnaturally sharp teeth, just normal enough complete with his person suit to piece together a fitting illusion of humanity. His keen sense of smell, one upped only by Will’s own. 

“What’s the recipe?” He asks it testily, intrigued and despite where his coworkers believe his morals lie, eager to succumb to whatever lies in wait behind Hannibal’s door. 

Hannibal understands, the context passing between them effortlessly as their selves begin to blur. “In an ecosystem, there is an established food chain,” he explains. “To cater to the balance and maintain it so that all the others may thrive. The top predators make feasts of the primary, secondary, and tertiary consumers, just as they eat what the primary producers give. We are merely keeping the balance, restoring it if you will.” 

“We are the top predators?” 

“We have the potential,” replies Hannibal. “We certainly can be.”

The invitation is reprised there and they both know it. “Don’t dig in before I’m there,” he instructs, double-checking the filled dog bowls and neatly made up bed. He wasn’t so sure he’d wake up there this time. Neither was he all that opposed either. “I want to sous chef.” 

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Hannibal says in lieu of a goodbye. 

Will shrugs on a jacket and flicks off the lights, locking the door behind him. 

Hearing already amplified tenfold as the moon rose higher and his skin began to prickle like it didn’t quite fit, the sound of the lock clicking into the notch echos on the way to his car. The drive is accompanied by music that quickly grows too loud for his oversensitive hearing and with a sound more wolfish than he’d sooner make around Hannibal yet, he turns the radio off. 

Hasty, Will pushes the speed limit with the knowledge that commutes are minimal around the area and have thinned from bumper-to-bumper all the way to a thin tickle of staggered vehicles. He occupies himself counting the intervals between turns he has to make. His fingers twitch restlessly on the wheel. Out of the corner of his eye, the moon is ascending above the trees as they give way, fading to suburbia. 

He sinks his teeth into his lip and he swears they’re already pointier than they were last he remembered. Interest piquing, Will entertains the reality of not only him stepping from the confines of his skin, but Hannibal too. No longer building walls but tearing them apart until it’s their hands that are bloody and bruised. Theirs to bandage together, too.

What he should be doing is calculating the risks- there are many, so many he could count off the top of his head. To list them all would take Will driving here and back multiple times. Still, he isn’t compelled to stop. If anything, his foot presses harder on the gas. 

“You’re being an idiot,” Will mutters. 

His own words fall on selectively deaf ears. 

How curious is it they suddenly hear again once he’s at Hannibal’s door, leaning over his heels and into the balls of his feet just to strain and hear the footsteps approaching after his knock. 

It opens, revealing Hannibal. It could have been the dim lighting or the vision sharpened by the night and the knowledge it brought, but he did look rather pale. Not unhealthy, not weak. Simply washed out. The astoundingly dark suit clinging to his frame aids in the illusion. There is an absence of showy, clashing patterns. No geometric ties with dimensions Will would guide with his eyes to avoid looking into Hannibal’s for long periods of time, no stripes on top of more stripes in a different direction, no-

“Hello, Will.” 

Unexpectedly brash, Will brushes past him. There is no power dynamic here, they’ve now crossed that boundary. It was never violated but instead stepped over gingerly. He was waiting for the shoe to drop, and waiting with open arms. They were equals now, after all. Or they would be when the night was done. 

“Doctor Lecter.” 

“It is good to see you.” The gentle clink of the door closing and locking. Will exhales and with the carbon dioxide went every previous reservation he felt. Hunger, bone-deep and month long waiting, settles greedily in his chest. Hannibal gives him a knowing look, and Will reflects it. He can feel a hunger similar from Hannibal- more reserved but just barely. 

Will paces around as he always does, tips of his fingers pressing insistently along the spines of books. “You know,” he says, resolute in his decision not to look straight at Hannibal just yet. 

Hannibal remained still, perched by his desk and eyeing Will. “So do you.” 

He flips absently through the pages of a book and thinks about dog-earing a page just to see Hannibal’s eye twitch. Will decides there’s other things he’d rather see tonight and then shelves the book. Downcast, the floor is the next subject of eyes Will doesn’t allow to wander. “Sharp teeth, for one,” he starts. “And I don’t recall ever seeing your reflection before.” It’s a weak point, but he doesn’t need to supply evidence for what he knows to be concrete. Takes one to know one, one monster to another. 

“You have never seen me in front of a mirror,” Hannibal presses anyways. 

Will looks up then, lips stretching into a thin smile. He doesn’t part them lest the canines underneath he can feel growing in be visible. There is a pleasure in withholding what Hannibal wants to see. It’s mutual. “You’re bound to have one in the house,” he says. “If you’re so desperate to keep up appearances, let’s take a walk and see.” 

Duly impressed, Hannibal smiles in return. He covers ground in two quick strides until he and Will are close. Closer than the chairs would allow them. Will holds his ground. “You are not the most ambiguous yourself, dear,” Hannibal replies, tilting Will’s chin up with a thumb. 

As if in a willing trance, Will peers into Hannibal’s eyes. They carry a reddish glint that’s fascinating to stare at. “What gave me away?” 

“The smell of dog,” Hannibal responds bluntly. 

“Oh, fuck off,” Will grunts, tempted to bite into the skin of Hannibal’s thumb. He nudges away the hand and finds Hannibal’s eyes again. “Where is he?” 

“Who?” Hannibal asks. His playing coy is spoiled by his look of sheer delight. 

Will’s heart skips a beat and he elects to ignore it. “Dinner,” he clarifies. 

A nod. “Right this way,” says Hannibal, walking from the room. Will follows on his heels, itching with anticipation he’d buried for too long. This was a change in the pattern of snuffing fires. He’d let them burn, walking the line of fear and lust without abandon just this once. 

  
  


They surpass the kitchen, and come to the dining room. With a man, arms tied to the table legs and ankles in the same fashion, splayed across the table, Hannibal grips his chair at the very end, eyeing him with disdain. Typical of Hannibal to be irked not by the state of the meat but by the stain it would leave on his furniture. 

He’d been gagged, mouth covered with a thin sheet of off-white fabric. Evidently Hannibal had administered drugs as well. His pupils were dilated beyond belief, drugs leaving him limp and defenseless. In and out of it. Will knew the feeling intimately. 

“Tell me about him,” Will prompts, staring emotionlessly as the man writhed. His movements were sluggish and badly coordinated. There would be no reprieve for him. Will couldn’t care even if he wanted to. He wished he could blame it on the moon and what it cast over him. Though any other day he suspected he'd share the same nonchalance. 

Hannibal produces a card from his pocket, crossing the room and stopping beside Will’s end of the table. Will squints at the card as Hannibal speaks. 

“Charles Snyder,” Hannibal says. The business card is stark and straight to the point- an investigative journalist who specialized in crime, specifically homicide. The name becomes familiar but it hasn’t yet hit Will where and how. “While you were in the Baltimore State Hospital, your predicament was the subject of countless headlines, Freddie Lounds’ merely the most relevant to us. Charles Snyder assisted in spreading the notion that you are an intelligent psychopath. He petitioned for you to recieve the death penalty.” 

Will, at the remembrance of the past months, winces and swallows hard to rid himself of the phantom pain in his throat. The feeling of a tube being forcibly shoved as far down as it would go was in no hurry to escape his brutal subconscious. Not spoiling his willingness to be here, but swelling up hot in his gut, anger rears its head. “My predicament,” Will repeats. “Yeah, the predicament you put me in.” 

Hannibal doesn’t look sorry. Will can’t tell if he wants him to or not. “I thought it may be cathartic to humble him.” 

“It might be just as cathartic to humble you,” Will counters, raising an eyebrow. 

Hannibal holds their eye contact, pocketing the business card. “Not when you finally find me interesting,” he says. “Not when we’ve gotten so close to knowing each other,  _ seeing  _ each other. Your loss would be greater than your victory. Relief would be temporary, Will, but your loneliness would last.” 

“I’m not lonely.” 

“Not yet,” says Hannibal. “You have me.” 

Running a hand through his hair, Will scoffs. His shirt feels too tight and his stomach growls. The moon must be well on its way to the center of the sky by now. He almost wishes he could see it. “Before you and after you,” says Will, bitterly. It isn’t regret, but resigned acceptance. This is perhaps what he’s always wanted no matter how hard and how long it took for him to come to that realization. “That’s the difference in my life.” 

The statement brings something shy of a blush to Hannibal’s face that’s enchanting to see. Will feels sick by it, in the best way. He’ll go to lengths in order to see it again. 

“As it is in mine,” Hannibal answers, so reverent Will has to avert his eyes. 

Will looks over Synder’s body, breath still shallow. “What’d you give him?” 

“Something to subdue him and to give the food a better taste.” 

“How did you  _ get  _ him?” Will pulls out his chair and takes a seat, noting the knives lining the table and loosely considering cutting a hole in Snyder’s trousers up his leg to see him jump. 

Hannibal vanishes into the kitchen for a moment and comes back with an apron fastened around his waist complete with plastic sheets which he lays on the floor surrounding the table. “I’ve been calculating this design for weeks,” he explains. “I learned his schedule and figured when best to catch him off guard and where it would direct attention to mislead. His absence won’t be talk for a good while.” Hannibal tsks and snaps. Both Will and Synder’s eyes go to him. He smiles and tilts Synder’s chin similarly as he did to Will’s, only with less intimacy and more aggression. “Charles Synder is halfway across the country, soon to land in Florence, Italy, where he’ll practice the art of writing to deaf ears right up until the moment his body is discovered,  _ if  _ it is ever discovered.” 

Electricity thrums just under Will’s skin. His shoulders hike up, fingers twitching. For a knife to rip him open, or to see how much blood a fingernail could draw when aimed in the right place at the precise angle. “Will his body be discovered?’ Will asks Hannibal as if Snyder did not lie there listening. 

Too infuriatingly elegant to shrug, Hannibal communicates the very same sentiment with a flicker of his eyes and jut of his chin. “That’s entirely dependent on how much will be left.” 

Will grins, then, pretenses forgotten. Hannibal’s surprise shows before shifting into distinct satisfaction. Hannibal offers a smile back, what would be dismissed as slightly abnormal sharp teeth now grown into sure fangs that just reach his bottom lip. 

“You told me you wanted to sous-chef, my dear,” Hannibal starts, reaching for his knife as Will reaches for his. “We may begin when you are ready, it’s only polite.” His voice is tremulous now, thick with anticipation and piling amazement. A hunger present, too. 

Grin still on his face, Will drags the knife up Snyder’s chest, nimbly making swift work of each button on his shirt. Meanwhile the moon rises, and there in the dining room the dark walls and herbs masterfully replicate the semblance of being outdoors. For now, it’s enough, and Will is conscious of his fingers growing deftly into something more attune to claws. He uses the knife up until he can no longer hold it, transformation in progress. He who is the weapon required none. When he looks up, Hannibal is caught, a moth to a light, staring unabashedly at Will. Will waits a second and then gives Hannibal no warning before hurling the knife at him. 

It cuts through the air, and it slips into Hannibal’s hand with ease. Hannibal grips it by the handle, wielding two knives. Will admires the sight- his hair starting to fall from the confines of gel by now along with the white tips of fangs peeking through his lips. 

“If we never crossed paths again, Will, I would remember this moment forever,” Hannibal declares, committing to memory how the flannel clinging to Will is hanging on by a thread, how his hair, overgrown, falls in thicker curls and frames his face just how sculptors spent agonizing time trying to perfect the same shapes. Will’s jaw is set, indicating the ingrown rows of canines that had breached his gums for the night. 

Will hasn’t replied, struck by the confounding pleasure of being seen.  _ Appreciated.  _ Professional curiosity and scrutiny, he’d come to expect and adapt to, but genuine adoration was new. Just as he hungered for the body at their mercy, he hungered for more of the approval Hannibal conveyed. And he knew Hannibal hungered just as much to give it all to him. 

“How do you feel?” Hannibal asks. He knows. He wants to hear it. 

Will decides this may all be more rewarding if he draws out every moment- let the intensity of it drive them more powerfully later. “I advise you not to psychoanalyze me over dinner,” he replies, taunting lilt to his voice. “You’d think it would be rude.” 

“Me?” Hannibal tosses a knife and catches it. Snyder jerks on the table. “Why, never.” 

Will rolls his eyes and rips off Synder’s shirt. A heartbeat roars in his ears, too fast with terror to be his own. It’s Snyder’s, a sixteenth note to his own half note. Will cannot wait to pinpoint the moment where it all goes quiet. Without further ado, the sharpened, animal claws meet warm human flesh and blood. Syder produces an ugly, muffled sound. To Hannibal’s composing ears, the sound is otherwise discordant. He’d very much like to not hear it again, and there’s one surefire way to guarantee that result. He hovers the knives in his hands above Synder’s head, a performance for him to see, eyes following the shine of the blades as they come down. They frame his neck, residing on top of his collarbones while Hannibal bends in between them and bites into his throat, sucking as blood rushes to the puncture wound. 

They pierce something, puncturing a lung, Will thinks, before he abandons thought to tear apart the man’s chest with his bare hands. Once he starts, he doesn’t stop. He can’t bring himself to, violent bliss overbearing and true in the way skin and muscle give under his might, blood rushing between his fingers and up to his elbows. He hadn’t even realized how hard he’d been panting until he halts to breathe before bending over and sinking his teeth into the man’s gut. 

A little pathetic, how easily skin gives and breaks under the suggestion of slightly sharpened teeth. Will revels in it, taking his fill until his face is slick with blood. He staggers backwards eventually once he felt appeased enough to pause. Hannibal’s eyes go to him, Will always his highest priority. And the unspoken response in the depths of those eyes indicates that what Hannibal sees before him is no longer human- perhaps never was. 

“You see now why I wanted to share this dinner with you,” Hannibal ventures, tongue swiping across his thin lip and smearing blood with it. Will mimics the action, licking the carnage from his own. 

Will looks over at Snyder as a reply forms in his head. He gives a weak croak and goes limp- with finality, his head lolls to the side. The arterial spray- all that hadn’t made it into Hannibal’s mouth- stained Snyder himself, his face and all down his chest, to where Will had made a ravine between his ribs, a bloodied mound littered with ferocious bite marks. 

“You wanted something intimate.” 

“Only with you.” 

Will’s puff of breath comes out like a growl. He smiles at Hannibal. “You wanted to be seen.” 

“By you,” Hannibal answers, providing Will the pleasure of a toothy smile. His teeth are red, too. 

Sated, Will pulls out a chair, forgoing his end of the table to be close to Hannibal. “I won’t remember this in the morning,” he says woefully. The wretched act ascending good or evil, bordering on righteous behaviorism, was something he’d want to remember forever. To think of losing it made him consider refusing to sleep. 

Hannibal tilts his head. His skin had been imbued with new color. The implication he’d been holding off on blood to dine with Will stirred something hot in his gut. “Do you ever remember your monthly rendezvous?” 

Will shakes his head. “I used to, but I, uh, started blocking it out as I got older.” 

“You were scared of your own potential.” 

“I was,” he agrees. “I’m not. Not anymore.” 

Hannibal reaches for his hand- whatever you’d call it at this point, nails grown into something more pointed and dangerous, skin mixed with grown in hair. Hannibal holds it anyway. Will can feel the cool of his skin and holds his hand tighter. “You can stop blocking out what you cannot change. Consider it as much as a part of you as the lives you save.” 

“I do consider it a part of me. That’s the problem,” Will says. 

Hannibal traces his knuckles with a thumb. “Your condition is not a flaw, Will. Neither is mine. We are given the facilities to appreciate unconventional tastes, and now to share that with each other. I would even say I am thankful for it.”

Will glances at Synder. His chest no longer rises, heartbeat gone silent. There is a level of bliss there, which he experimentally does not shove down. “If I do indulge, and believe me Hannibal, I want to, what do we do when there is a body count?” 

“Run,” Hannibal answers, turning their intertwined hands. “We can go anywhere.” 

“Just-” Will gestures with his free hand. “-Keep running, leave them misguiding trails and revel in temporary sanctuaries?” 

“We are clever enough to dissuade authority, and they will give up in time. It’s happened before. I witnessed the rise and fall of crime in Florence. If the fisherman’s bait fails and the fish are nowhere to be seen, they aren’t keen to keep trying lest the ice melt under their feet.” 

Catching on to the metaphor, Will gives a half-smile. “You sound like you’re talking from experience.” 

Hannibal presses a kiss to his knuckle, looking up at Will through his eyelashes. The faint graze of a fang against his skin makes him shiver. “I am,” Hannibal says. 

They continue to dine, Hannibal sipping the trails of blood from the man’s neck like the finest wine. Will digs in too, taste buds not so much his own as the monster he’s awakened willingly instead of begrudgingly. Raw and fresh food makes no difference, and Hannibal has promised the next night to cook whatever is left when they’re each more…. cognizant and human. The closest they can be.

Will doesn’t remember what took place after that, only that it had brought them to the softest bed he’d ever had the graces of sleeping in. The sheets as well as firm arms envelop him and that is just how he wakes up. 

Immediately the great aches in his body accompany him upon waking. This part was constant- happening ever since the full moons and hazy, bloody raids. It took a toll, transformation. Will turns over and unceremoniously noses into Hannibal’s chest with a groan. The arms around him secure their hold. It’s comfortable. The most content he’s felt in so long he can’t find the last time he was ever so at rest in his memory palace. It seems a renovation is in order to construct new rooms, build from the ground and roots and all. 

“Good morning, Will.” 

He slowly opens his eyes. A thicket of wiry chest hair greets him and he lays his- now discernibly human hand, there. “I remember it.” 

Hannibal lays his hand on top of Will’s. “Do you?” 

“Mhm, you said I smell like dog,” Will states, nudging him. “And we ate a guy.” 

“In simple words, yes,” Hannibal allows, looking faintly amused. “And we will finish eating him tonight.” 

Will looks into his eyes. They’re dark, keeping him in place despite his alleged aversion to eye contact altogether. “Where do we go from here? There’s evidence.” 

Hannibal moves down on the bed, putting them face to face. “There won’t be.” 

“How can you be so sure?” 

“Do you trust me?” Hannibal asks. 

Will stares him down. “I did once.” 

Hannibal appears unmoved. “You can do so again.” 

Already having resigned himself to Hannibal’s whims on the condition of being on equal ground, Will nods. He doesn’t answer with words, rather leaning up to seal their lips together. Hannibal pauses before he reciprocates, a hand moving to hold the back of Will’s head just as one of Will’s traces his prominent cheekbone. They both taste faintly of blood and much of mutual exploration. 

They pull back, breathing hitched and eyes alight. 

**Author's Note:**

> I might write a sequel, this is where you tell me if that's a good idea or not!!


End file.
